Category Archives: American children’s books

Baby Memory Books from around the World

Posted on by

They go by many names…  Baby books, baby journals,  baby milestone books, and domestic baby diaries are a few of them.  To facilitate the tracking of information, memories, and storage of precious photos, designers experiment with the format and layout.  Does the new mother want prompts or lots of white space to fill up with thoughts and observations?   Should she start recording her experiences  as soon as she knows she is pregnant, the beginning of the journey to motherhood, or wait until the baby arrives?   Is a choice of bindings in a rainbow of colors important so the book will fit in with the décor of the nursery or master bedroom?  Or would a completely customizable product, such as InScribe Publishing’s babEbook make the process more fun, more personal, and much easier, whatever the mother’s circumstances?

As showcases of illustration and repositories of data about individuals, these highly ephemeral books have been collectible for some time.   The Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library at UCLA has been accumulating titles from the late Victorian era to the present day and now has six hundred examples spanning 125 years.   Some of Cotsen’s baby books, along with the first edition of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s  Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946) and other treasures, were brought out for members of Princeton’s BabyLab when they visited Special Collections in October.

Because the milestones of an infant’s first twelve months are more or less agreed upon, a baby book’s contents are relatively predictable.  After recording birth weight and length comes a series of firsts: first tooth, shoe, word, etc.  It’s the illustrator’s challenge to capture the excitement of the moment in a way that will evoke pleasant memories later.  Ella Pipping’s Jag [Me], a Swedish baby book first published in 1937, was undoubtedly reprinted many times on the strength of its headpieces by the mother-daughter team of Signe Hammarsten-Jansson and Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomins.   No Swedish is necessary to figure out where to enter most of the different statistics, but no information about a baby was ever entered on this copy’s pristine pages.

Sugiura Hisiu’s Kodakara [Baby Book] (Tokyo: Misukoshi Department Store, 1909) is also perfectly preserved.  I wonder if many recipients of such beautiful books felt they were too pretty to write in them, even though the more likely explanation is that the new mother was simply too tired and busy to begin, much less keep up.  Many of the full-page illustrations are charming depictions of little children, full of surprising details about the coexistence of Eastern and Western fashions in Japan.The earliest of the three baby books shown to BabyLab was Baby’s Record (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, c.1898) illustrated by Maud Humphrey, beloved creator of sticky-sweet pictures of little children.  It’s a well-established urban legend that the mother of Humphrey Bogart was responsible for the famous Gerber logo baby.  She wasn’t.   The  Cotsen copy of the Record was given to “Baby,” by Mrs. Leo Fleishman (presumably a family friend or relative) and “Baby” was Edward Jacques Ruff, the son born to Joseph Ruff and Rosa Rosenthal Ruff November 22, 1910 in Mexico City. His first shoe is shown to the right.  The Ruffs appear to have been devout Jews and recorded little Edward’s first prayer in transliterated Hebrew  and descrubed his first visit to temple with his grandfather at age three.  The handwritten memorandum reveals that Edward “was very good.  Said Amen about a minute after the rest of the congregation which very much embarrassed his grandfather.”

The three books could not be more different in appearance, but they do have one thing in common: baby’s vaccination for small pox is among the milestones of the first year.  In Sweden, it looks as if the doctor came to the house.  Edward was just four months and three days when he was inoculated.   Look carefully at the little Japanese baby and you’ll see he’s crying and picking at the red spots on his arm.Very little has been written about the history of the baby book before the 1870s, when the first ones were published.  The only scholarly article I could find, “The Observing Eye;: A Century of Baby Diaries” by Doris Wallace in a 1994 issue of Human Development suggests that German psychologists who were leaders in their profession agreed agreement that the systematic observation of very young children complemented experimental and testing methodologies.

Wallace seems not to have been familiar with parent diarists in England before Charles Darwin.  Novelist Mrs. Gaskell managed to cover the first six months of her daughter Marianne’s life, the very thoughtful, insightful, and loving notes making it a fascinating document to read.  She was almost certainly following in the footsteps of Maria and Richard Edgeworth, who showed parents in their highly influential Practical Education (1798), the scientific value of detailed anecdotes about child behavior for the way they revealed the child’s thought processes as they matured.  The compilation of such a diary, the Edgeworths argued, was the way to realize Thomas Reid’s wish to “obtain a distinct and full history of all that hath passed in the mind of a child from the beginning of life and sensation till it grows up to the use of reason.”   Easier said than done, but it remains a noble goal for recording the mundane details of babyhood, when what mother really needs is a good night’s sleep.

Great American Women Cookbook Writers in Picture Book Herstories

Posted on by

Count on  Deborah Hopkinson, a distinguished author of children’s non-fiction, to take on the challenge of introducing two giants of American culinary herstory in picture book biographies.  Her subjects are Amelia Simmons, whose American Cookery (1796) was the first of its kind and Fanny Merritt Farmer (1857-1912), author of the best-selling Boston Cooking School Cookbook  (1896), which in various incarnations  reached a 13th edition in 1990.  Not having led adventurous lives, painted innovative artwork, made major advances in science, or written famous fictions, the two women had to be largely reinvented to be worthy of remembrance.

Fannie Merritt Farmer (1857-1915), the first to write recipes with precise quantities measured in standardized equipment in the Boston Cooking School Cookbook (1896), was a product of the domestic science movement.  She came from a well-educated Boston Unitarian family and was expected to attend college.  Those plans were upended by a paralytic stroke (or polio) she suffered at age sixteen.   She regained enough strength in her twenties to learn cooking and operate a boarding house known for its bill of fare out of her mother’s home.  Although mostly confined to a wheelchair by thirty, she still pursued a busy and successful career teaching, administering the Boston Cooking School, founding her own school, and improving nutrition and care of invalids.

Fanny in the Kitchen could have been the inspirational story of a physically challenged female icon, but Hopkinson chose instead to dream up a story revolving around the daughter of Mrs. Charles Shaw, Fannie’s employer of  who recommended she attend the Boston Cooking School. Fannie cooks like an angel, much to the dismay of Marcia Shaw, who feels she has been displaced as her pregnant mother’s helper.  Fannie, as realized by illustrator Nancy Carpenter, has the briskly efficient no-nonsense air (and turned-up nose) of Mary Poppins.  She is kind and attentive enough to see that Marcia likes being in the kitchen and wants to learn.  Marcia’s lessons give her the idea of writing everything down to make it easier to retain the art and science of cookery.  Her pupil’s mastery of cake baking coincides with her departure for new horizons.Almost no biographical information survives about Amelia Simmons beyond a few tidbits in the cookbook.  Hopkinson’s solution?  Admit up front that she’sl Inventing a credible backstory for the “American orphan” that is  a “revolutionary confection.”   It goes like this: her father perished in the war of independence and her mother died shortly thereafter of smallpox, leaving their daughter poor and friendly. The wives of the town elders decide that rather than making the municipality responsible for her maintenance, a family will take her in as a “bound girl,” presented by Hopkinson as a kind of mother’s helper rather than a contractual form of slavery.   Stalwart  Amelia walks into the Beans’ chaotic home, where two of the six boys take bites out of apples and toss them aside like colonial Ramona Quimbys.   Without missing a beat, she takes over household management from their overwhelmed mother.

This is a cheerier and more palatable take on Miss Simmons’ slightly sour explanation of her qualifications for writing American Cookery.  Being “reduced to the necessity of going into families in the line of domestics,” she possesses “the more general and universal knowledge” a female needs to be of service to her employer, the “Lady of fashion and fortune.”  Simmons’ advice that an orphan in service must maintain a character for strict virtue, coded language for the unpleasant reality that she will have no protectors to forestall the unwanted advances of the master or his son is given a pass by Hopkinson,

She does, however, assume that Amelia Simmons intended to rise above her gallingly low social position.   Having learned to read by helping one of the little Beans with his letters,  when asked by Mrs. Bean how she might assist her,  Amelia replies that she wants to master the art of American cooking so she can share it with her fellow citizens.  But first she has to build upon a foundation upon English recipes, then advance to variations using American ingredients like winter squash, molasses, and corn meal, testing them on the hungry Bean family.   A successful afternoon tea where the town ladies sample Amelia’s divine cakes and strawberry preserve, leads to an invitation to bake a cake as a gift for display on the occasion of George Washington’s inauguration.  That “plucky patriot” Amelia outdoes herself by producing thirteen cakes, one for each of the new states, lavishly decorated with gilt.  Our first president pronounces his slice “Delicious.”

Of course, there is not a word of truth in this pretty tale of the new nation.  There is nothing distinctively American about Amelia’s independence cake, whose recipe is very close to almost any English recipe for  a yeast-raised great cake, with its huge quantities of flour, butter, eggs, brandy and “plumbs”—raisins, currants, and citron.  If Hopkinson had slipped in more nuggets from American Cookery—Amelia’s praise of shad, her suggestion that raising rabbits was a sure money-maker, her distaste for garlic, her recipes for what looks like a good old pot pie, a Christmas butter cookie flavored with ground coriander seed, or candying watermelon rind as a substitute for citron—there wouldn’t have been much of a story, however mouthwatering such details might be to the adult reader with a fine palate.

At times these two picture book biographies seem to be turning back the clock, even though there is never even a whisper of a suggestion that homemaking is the only path for girls– or ought to be. They do, I think, suggest to young readers that the kitchen was a site of empowerment for women in previous centuries and that ought to be remembered and honored as such, even if producing light, delicate biscuits will never be in one’s skill set.  This model of female advancement has not yet outlived its usefulness, but rather morphed in surprising ways in the twenty-first century.  Last week the New York Times Food Section ran an article about Arab women, their careers outside the home stymied, who have found an alternative calling demonstrating home cooking on YouTube food channels.  Pleased and surprised to win millions of subscribers and earn respectable incomes, they find great satisfaction teaching others the secrets of  making delicious food.